What Does It Take! - Stock Photography Blog

what does it take?!

posted on 9th of december, 2011

What does it take to have the honor of having your image on the front page, the home page of DT, of being the featured contributor?

I thought that as a contributor, you'd have to reach some kind of level of excellence "experience" wise and to achieve some milestones regarding your portfolio like: having a good number of uploads, an even better number of sales, maybe having few images in the "Editor's choice" category (a very personal target of mine since I did not manage so far to add this category to my portfolio), etc. I thought of all these things and I watched most of the featured contributors portfolios in my quest to get an answer to this question: what does it take?

If you take a look at the current featured contributor (nothing personal, and by the way, @sbuckley: very nice VIP portfolio!!): all of those criteria I thought would count are not related to it. So I got confused and asked myself again: what does it take?

Besides being curious about your thoughts on the matter, I think there are some criteria regarding this "status" we can achieve, and if there are some of you who know it, please share!

There's also a moral to this: I like to think that trying to reach the level of having one of my images in the "editor's choice" category, or trying to become the next featured contributor, has made me little by little more pretentious about my work, has made me my own critic and eventually has made me better in photography! Don't loose hope and don't quit asking "what does it take?"!

Tags: choice contributor editor featured images

Comments (8)

	Posted by Rosedarc on December 17, 2011 Eh eh, David, your wish was granted! :-)) Congratulations to Brad for a well deserved feature!
	Posted by Tangie on December 14, 2011 There are so many talented and deserving contributors. We are aware we may miss adding some of them as featured but you can recommend your fellow contributors and we promise to take the into consideration. Just as long you don't recommend yourself :).
	Posted by Davidwatmough on December 10, 2011 Brad Calkins deserves to be contributor of the month............ excellent sales figures of great images.... David.
	Posted by Davidwatmough on December 10, 2011 I looked at the Dreamstime Editors choice images just now and most seem to be by professional illustrators who are all in a class above me . I was looking at the winner of a national UK wildlife competition in the magazine Photography Monthly this morning............ and to me it looked like a very sick animal.....a brown hare.............I think there are no absolutes in assessing images... its highly subjective.......... but there are authors whose work sells very well and others like me who do not excel but get pleasure from trying to do better. David.
	Posted by Rosedarc on December 10, 2011 The reason I'm saying this is that someone asked for photos of Olivia Munn in the request section, and one of the admin (not sbukley) responded saying they would have some very soon, and here they were a couple of days later, reviewed in priority and they they were all purchased.
	Posted by Rosedarc on December 10, 2011 I think that the featured contributor this week has a very large portfolio, unique and is bringing some added value to DT. Basically he/she's new to DT but not to stock photography and he/she has - I believe - many more photos in the pipeline, waiting to be accepted (the weekly upload limit). To be given the current featured contributor in this instance is a way of saying to buyers that DT has acquired a photographer in this niche of famous people, and also a way to say tanks for coming to DT to the contributor. So I think this selection is quite unusual.
	Posted by Egomezta on December 09, 2011 Congratulations for being the featured contributor. That's great.
	Posted by Bradcalkins on December 09, 2011 Thanks for using my image :) I must admit I hope to be featured someday - not sure what more I can do ! I think there is a certain element of the images needing to be unique in some way, that goes above the normal in some way. To that point, this month featured contributor has a large collection of images that simply cannot be replicated. While my portfolio is clearly strong at selling, there isn't a lot in it that wows - 'just' a solid portfolio of images and consistent uploading... Keep at it :)